Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  The American writer William L. Fox has called monotone spaces such as the Ross Ice Shelf isotrophic landscapes. That these landscapes can induce confusion in the traveller comes down to our evolutionary heritage. Our species gained our concept of space in the dense jungle and on the short, framed views of the savannah. When faced with a landscape that offers few visual clues and swallows up attempts at interpretation, we are spatially illiterate. A vast formless area such as the Ross Ice Shelf confronts us with a problem. How can we get a purchase on it? What is there to anchor our perception?

  Perhaps because of this, horizontal places such as deserts, ice shelves and ocean often seem the most revered but least loved of wildernesses. As the seventeenth-century theologian and dabbler in the cosmos Thomas Burnet said in his book The Theory of the Earth, ‘As all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their excess and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.’

  My fellow occupants of the A-frame bear this out. They loll around the hut in the above-mentioned stupor as I brew a midnight cup of tea. From the frosted window near the kitchen the only feature of the landscape that appears to be alive is Mount Erebus. An active volcano, it is puffing out wispy smoke. Like a painting with eyes that follow you around the room, it stays the same no matter how far you move away from it, or in what direction. From where I sip my tea it looks deceptively like a child’s sketch of a mountain, harmless and easy to climb.

  Robert Macfarlane writes: ‘Without doubt it is these harmless-looking conical mountains that have killed the most in human history.’ He’s right. On the north side of Erebus a scar a few kilometres long contains the wreckage of flight TE901, which ploughed into the mountain in 1979 on a sightseeing trip from New Zealand, killing all 257 passengers and crew. In this one catastrophic moment New Zealand gained the record of having more of its nationals die in Antarctica than has any other country.

  In this place the thin wall between the living and the dead is perforated. Further to the south, Scott and his party are buried under layers of ice, victims of malnutrition, scurvy and cold. A day’s sledge-hauling away from the South Pole, Scott recorded: ‘About the second hour of the march Bowers’ sharp eyes detected what he thought was a cairn; he was uneasy about it, but argued that it must be a sastrugus. Half an hour later he detected a black speck ahead. Soon we knew that this could not be a natural snow feature.’ What they had found was one of Amundsen’s deserted camps, and with it proof they had been beaten to the pole.

  Mount Erebus, Ross Ice Shelf.

  The wild fantasies projected on to Antarctica before its discovery had ignored the possibility its terrain would be so physically intimidating and dissolving of ambition. The first explorers witnessed the death of the utopian dream. Nothing had prepared them for the continent’s indifference to the human race. The desire for conquest became a saga of death and suffering.

  In 1845 a British explorer, John Franklin, led an expedition of 129 men to the Canadian Arctic in an attempt to find a north-west passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Both the men and their ships Erebus and Terror mysteriously disappeared. Many years later searchers found graves and a small garden plot on Beechey Island, where the group had camped the first winter. A forlorn effort, springing from a longing for greenness and fecundity at the end of the world, had been made to till what passed for soil.

  The same desire is manifest at McMurdo Station. Sitting alone at the industrial end of the base is a grey plywood building with a US Navy code stencilled in fading white paint near the door, an indication of how it got there. The building has no windows, but inside a shimmering array of tinfoil and lights powers a hydroponic greenhouse. The building is a favourite bolthole for denizens of the Ross Ice Shelf. When I enter I am overwhelmed by the warmth and the smell. There is a hammock strung up in one corner; you can lie back among the greenery and pretend for a while that you are somewhere else.

  Scott Base, too, is strangely verdant. In 1965 Bob Thomson, manager of the New Zealand Antarctic Programme, came up with the idea of green buildings after a visit to Ireland, where he had admired the white houses set in green fields. Perhaps, he thought, the inverse would be suitable in Antarctica. Inside the buildings the arcadian theme continues with photographs of luscious New Zealand wilderness.

  The A-frame hut mercifully eschews fashion: it is adorned in black plywood with red trim. As I doze on the bunk the hut creaks and groans with the shifting of ice and the expanding of plywood. With no night at this time of year, the sun merely does loops around the horizon. The shadows it casts are the only clue that time is passing. Sleep is neither deep nor rewarding.

  A-frame hut, Ross Ice Shelf.

  When the shadows stretch in a westerly direction, I rise and make thick porridge to steel me and my companions for the ski back to Scott Base. I leave the nearly empty whisky bottle on the shelf, a small koha to be consumed by the next peace-seeker. Mount Erebus watches as we clip on our skis and glide into a slow rhythm. Behind us the hut slips into the haze. There is little wind and already a dark watery hole is forming below Black Island. We notice the mirage but do not mention it. Above it, the tails of aircraft on the distant Williams Field runway elongate into giant sharks’ fins.

  Later that year the A-frame hut disappears, the victim of clumsy relighting of the diesel heater and a non-functioning fire extinguisher. The bitumen and plywood, dried to a crisp by years in the desert of ice, go up with a whoompf. In the perpetual darkness of May the flames light up the sky.

  White Island from Scott Base, photographed by Laurence Aberhart.

  Scott’s dream

  77°49′S

  We are a small group of misfits on a vast floating expanse of ice. Our mission: survival training. We huddle in a pit sawn into the polystyrene-like snow and refer to it as our lounge. While Joe finishes carving a snow coffee table with a dessertspoon and begins work on a television set, we talk of life elsewhere.

  A light evening breeze springs up. This gives us an excuse to build a wall on the windward side of the lounge. It’s a rebellion against the endless horizontal whiteness but no one is brave enough to say so. We stick to the premise it will shelter us from the wind.

  While we cut blocks of snow with hand saws, photographer Laurence wanders the camp with his 120-year-old camera, escaping from time to time under the black hood. Visions of seascape horizons and the details in apparent nothingness are slowly being blazed on to his plates. Back in the lounge, our task completed, Wal expounds on the intricacies of diesel engines and hydraulics operating in the cold. Joe finishes carving the TV set and places it on a ledge in the wall.

  This ice shelf is a place only a hermit could love. The further you move away from the edge of it, the more otherworldly the surroundings become. I ask Wal what he thinks lies over the horizon to the south. ‘Bugger all,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing there, mate.’

  This is conceivably true. In 1841, when forty-year-old British adventurer James Clark Ross arrived at the southern end of the Ross Sea he found a colossal floating delta of glacial ice, with cliffs he referred to as ‘the great icy barrier’. Far inland, on the ice up to four kilometres thick that coats central Antarctica, there was and is little else. This ice moves downward to the coast in a slow ooze, making it one of the biggest constant movements on the planet. In this singular environment, space and time seem to dissolve. There is no visible life.

  Once the ice reaches the Ross Sea it flattens out into the endless floating plain of the ice shelf. The plain is a place of absence: there are no forests or rivers, only frozen water masquerading as land under an intensely blue sky. At this time of the year there is also no rising and setting of the sun so no idea of east or west, no sense of where here even is.

  The first night camping out on the ice is usually accompanied by a feeling of absolute freedom and endless possibility. After two or three days the feeling turns malignant. There is nothing to rebel against, nothing to bounce off,
no reply to your thoughts. The ice flattens and shrivels language into monosyllables and eventually into silence. Like the freeze-dried food we have brought with us, our thoughts are eventually consumed. In time the ice will ablate everything. The only way to survive will be to leave.

  No one lives out on the ice shelf. Anyone who stays in a field camp for more than a few weeks eventually falls prey to syndromes such as chronic insomnia and the 100-yard stare – that’s a 100-yard stare in a 50-yard room. Over a summer out here you will slow down and approach a state of hibernation. Without contrast with an ‘other’ you will be in danger of slipping into psychic oblivion.

  One of the few people to have attempted to live out on the Ross Ice Shelf over a winter was the American explorer Richard Byrd. In 1934, on his second expedition to Antarctica, Byrd set up a hut 200 kilometres from his main base Little America II, which lay on the seaward edge. It was to be a Henry Thoreau Walden Pond-like experience: man in the wilderness. It turned into a living hell. Within weeks Byrd began to suffer a dementia that included vivid hallucinations. His companions at base camp were so alarmed by the garbled radio messages they were receiving from him and so concerned about his mental state they set out to rescue him in the dead of winter. The US Navy’s spin on the affair was that his condition had been caused by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove.

  Richard Byrd revisits his old hut at his base Little America II, 1947.

  Somewhere out on the ice shelf, not far from where we sit in our lounge, life ends. There is oxygen but no water, soil or nutrients; it is more like deep space than an earthly habitat. The odd skua flies in and out. Humans cross it on sledges, taking sustenance with them and returning before it runs out. Without imported resources, life can only decay and slip quietly over the threshold to death.

  The sterile environment applies also to culture. There are no indigenous people to teach us how to live in this place, no received wisdom or code of living other than what we bring with us. There is no going native.

  When Herbert Ponting, the photographer on Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, learned that because of his advanced years – he was forty-one – he would not be joining the party trekking to the South Pole across the far reaches of the Ross Ice Shelf, he was not put out. ‘There would be nothing to photograph,’ he concluded. This was a logical response.

  It is this void that Laurence is busy trying to capture with shots of forlorn marker flags and the blank horizon. The light that might give some depth of contrast is rapidly fading. He reluctantly emerges from under his black veil and rejoins us.

  What the ice has done to the landscape it has done to art, paring it to the barest minimum. The literature of the Ross Ice Shelf consists only of personal diaries and records. Down here two thousand years of civilisation did not happen.

  We linger together well past bedtime, talking of our children. The sun plays its part by refusing to set, doing an orbit around the horizon and waltzing shadows across the lounge. Below us are about eighty metres of ice floating on the waters of the Ross Sea. Further towards the mainland and buried some sixteen metres down in the ice are Scott, Bowers and Wilson, frozen into their sleeping bags and wrapped in their tent. Somewhere beyond them lies Oates. Further to the south, near the base of the Beardmore Glacier, Evans lies slumped forward as if in prayer. The battle with self would have been the hardest part of all their treks. Trying to keep your marbles in an emptiness that provides no emotional sustenance, while your body is slowly reduced to a corpse, would have been diabolical.

  Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Edgar Evans, Robert Falcon Scott and Lawrence Oates at the South Pole, January 17, 1912.

  Ever since they died the men have been on a journey to the sea. Around 460 years from now Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Oates and Evans will be committed to the deep somewhere near Cape Crozier.

  At one in the morning I slip into my tent and pull layers of thick sleeping bags over my head to block out the beating sun. Visions of the day are projected on to the blackness. I am shuffling down the steps of a long deep tunnel carved under the ice. The light from the surface is a glaring halo twinkling with ice dust. There is a murmur of men’s voices as though we are in a vast cathedral. A pale blue light is emanating from the walls, which have been intricately carved with a spoon.

  Memorial cairn marking the site of Robert Falcon Scott’s tent.

  At intervals along the tunnel, carved into the walls, short shelves serve as sleeping quarters. In the first I find Wilson lying prone in his man-hauling gear, complete with harness. I fetch an emperor penguin’s egg from my pack and Wilson cradles it in his hands. He tells me about his dreams and a painting he is working on. He is shivering and has a layer of frost over him. I find a sleeping bag in my pack and cover him, tucking him in like a child. Finally I close his eyes with my gloved hand and move on down the passage.

  At the next shelf Bowers is checking his supply lists and muttering about the lack of paraffin left in the depots. I place a handful of rubber washers into his hands and close his frostbitten fingers tight.

  Evans is squeezed into the next shelf. He is a large man. I hand him a bottle of beer. His hands shake as he puts it to his mouth and takes a long draught. We talk about the pub he will own when he gets back home. He draws his sleeve over his mouth, wiping the dregs of beer from his beard. His teeth chatter as he rolls into a deep sleep.

  Further on, Oates is mumbling something about ponies and a lack of feed. I place a fresh lime in his hand. He clutches it to his breast, whispering, ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  Finally I reach Scott. He is writing furiously in his journal. The men with him are silent except for soft snorings. I offer him my last sleeping bag but he bats me away, hissing, ‘For God’s sake, man, leave me alone.’ We stare at each other for a moment in disbelief. He breaks the gaze with a grunt and goes back to his journal.

  I turn and make my way back up the tunnel. Through the blinding light at the surface I see two men and a dog team. I wave my arms mutely. They swish by, close enough for me to hear the driver swearing to the dogs in Russian while the other searches the horizon through thick frosted spectacles. They coalesce and disappear over the horizon. A wave of hopelessness engulfs me. I drop to the snow.

  When I wake, the visions hover in the tent. Perhaps I, too, am going mad. While my companion softly snores I check outside for footprints or any sign of a cave. I am tired, groggy: the dream has exhausted me. I brew a cup of tea and stare to the south through Joe’s TV screen.

  By the time we return to Scott Base it is early afternoon. We are back in a world of noise and time. A warm flood of home comes down the phone line from a place that is summer. I can hear the leaves rustling and the birdsong in the background as my daughters wake from their afternoon nap and talk to me.

  Conical monopole, Scott Base, photographed by Laurence Aberhart.

  Symmes’ hole

  77°51′S

  The notion of Antarctica had been brewing for a long time. In 319 B.C. Aristotle guessed there was a great southern land that balanced Arktos, the northern land mass. He called it Anti-Arktos. For the next two thousand or so years, his theory attracted every conceivable imagining, creating a geography of hope that persists to this day. There were Arcadian forests, lost civilisations, UFO bases. Since Antarctica was inaccessible for most of this time, these notions were hard to refute.

  It was perhaps John Symmes’ idea that was most remarkable. In 1818 the former infantry captain in the United States Army boldly asserted that the Earth was hollow. The planet, he said, consisted of five concentric spheres, with our outer earth as the largest. He visualised Earth’s crust as approximately 1,000 miles thick, with an Arctic opening about 4,000 miles wide and an Antarctic opening about 6,000 miles wide. He speculated that the inner surfaces of the concentric spheres in his hollow earth would be illuminated by sunlight reflected off the outer surface of the next sphere down and would be habitable, a ‘warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals i
f not men’.

  The idea wasn’t entirely new. The Inuit people of the Arctic had traditionally believed there were openings at the poles, and a warm paradise within the Earth from which their ancestors came and went. Ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Hindu writings echoed such sentiments.

  Symmes put his theory forward at a time when no one had as much as set eyes on Antarctica. James Cook had crossed the Antarctic Circle in 1773 and unwittingly come within 121 kilometres of the continent before being blocked by impenetrable ice. The general belief was that no great southern land actually existed. In 1804 Matthew Flinders, the Englishman who first circumnavigated Australia, gave the name of Terra Australis, used since the fifteenth century to denote the legendary landmass at the bottom of the world, to that continent.

  Symmes didn’t publish his theory, preferring to promote it via a vigorous lecture circuit. However, enthusiastic converts filled the gap. In 1826 a man called James McBride, who had attended Symmes’ lectures, anonymously published Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres and arranged for the profits to be paid to Symmes. The following year Symmes’ acolyte Jeremiah Reynolds published Remarks on a review of Symmes’ theory, which appeared in the American quarterly review.

  Symmes died in 1829, still believing fervently in his theory. A carved stone in the shape of a hollow earth was erected on his gravestone in Hamilton, Ohio, and is still there today.